About JINN
Justice In Nigeria Now (JINN) is a San Francisco-based organization working in solidarity with communities in Nigeria and allies in the U.S. to promote peace and corporate accountability and to ensure that extractive industries operate in a manner that respects human rights, protects the environment and enhances community livelihood.
JINN’s Goals:
- To build public awareness regarding oil company practices that violate human rights and destroy the environment.
- To see improvements in the operating practices of extractive industry in Nigeria that result in better conditions for people and the environment.
- To call for accountability and transparency regarding industry practices, such as full public disclosure regarding the extent of the relationship with military and police forces — including all payments, housing, and transportation provided.
- To advocate for U.S. policies that promote peace and corporate accountability in the Niger Delta.
- To work in solidarity with Nigerian civil society groups who are seeking job training and real jobs, environmental clean-up, schooling, staffed health clinics, clean water and electricity.
- To connect Nigerian groups in alliance with other organized communities around the world who are adversely affected by extractive industry practices, such as gas flaring.
JINN's media campaign
Current Campaigns:
- End gas flaring: In Nigeria, when oil companies began production in the 1960’s, the cheapest way to separate the identified product, crude oil, from the associated natural gas was to burn, or flare, natural gas that is associated with crude oil when it is pumped up from the ground. Oil companies in Nigeria engage in gas flaring as a 24 hour-a-day, 365 day-a-year practice. Some of these flares have burned without cessation for 40 years. People live literally next door to the roaring, ground-level flares that leap as high as a several-story building and belch black clouds of toxic smoke in the middle of, or next door to, their villages. Gas flaring harms local health through emissions that have been linked to cancers, asthma, chronic bronchitis, blood disorders, and other diseases. Gas flaring not only wastes a potentially valuable source of energy (natural gas), it also adds significant carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Read more here.
- Say no to further U.S. military support to Nigeria: In August 2009, Secretary Hillary Clinton, while visiting Nigeria, promised to explore further military support to Nigeria to address the crisis in the Niger Delta. JINN started a letter writing campaign to call on the State Department and the Obama Administration to support peaceful, diplomatic negotiations, not military support. Sign the letter!
- Support Transparency in Nigeria via U.S. City Council Resolutions: Starting in September 2009, JINN began a campaign to get a series of U.S. cities to vote on local resolutions that would call on the State Department to support diplomatic negotiations in the Niger Delta as well as call on the U.S. Senate and House to support new bills that would require companies in the extractive industry – including oil companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments to do business. The bill is called the Energy Security Through Transparency Act. Since October, JINN has successfully worked with the Oakland, CA; the Berkeley CA and the Richmond, CA city councils to pass resolutions in support of peaceful negotiations and corporate transparency in the Niger Delta. In 2010, JINN will continue to expand this effort.
- ChevWrong.org – Brings attention to Chevron’s hypocritical advertising by parodying its logo and Human Energy tagline. This letter action demands that Chevron stop paying the Nigerian military as its private security, provide jobs and clean up. The ChevWrong campaign coordinates with ongoing Chevron shareholder activism. Additionally JINN belongs to a coalition of groups committed to expose Chevron’s hypocrisy through the True Cost of Chevron campaign and Alternative Annual Report.
- Community Support - Connecting and supporting local communities in the Niger Delta that are seeking solutions to the problems caused by extractive industries in Nigeria.
